Increase Average Order Value (AOV)

Average Order Value is the price of your average order. If you have a $1,000 sale and a $2,000 sale your AOV is $1,500.

Increasing the AOV is like a pay raise. It means more revenue without more customers or higher customer acquisition costs. Magento offers several ways you can increase your average order value out of the box.

Let’s first check your average order value to set a benchmark. 

You can get the AOV from your Magento admin dashboard. It will be on the left with the heading “Average Order”. We recommend checking this value in Google Analytics over multiple time periods to establish a baseline so you can compare your results before and after changes, and year over year.

You can check your Google Analytics to see AOV by going to  Conversions -> E-Commerce -> Overview.

Your AOV will make sense after you check Google Analytics to see the AOV and determine which products are your best sellers. 

Here are some quick ways you can consider that will increase your AOV.

Bundle popular products with upsells

You are going to sell your most popular products anyway so this is the best place to increase the average order value. Consider what else a customer might need when purchasing your product. For example, if you are selling computers you might bundle three months of support at a discount. Or if you’re selling glasses you could do a case or some cleaning wipes. 

A customer will see the primary product you’re selling with an option to select the bundled items. You can create the bundle, add the products to it, and A/B test which one delivers the best results over a suitable time period.

You can find the steps to create a bundle product on Magento’s documentation here.

Add cross-sells to similar but more expensive products

Cross-sells are products that are impulse buys and could show in the cart or underneath the product. This is the candy bar at the cash register. Using our earlier example, you could add the cleaning wipes or the glasses case at a discount to make it easy for the customer to add these items to the cart, increasing your AOV.

To add cross-sells, upsells, or related products edit your product and go to the section 

Add upsells related to the product

An upsell is replacing the existing item in the cart with one of great value. For example, if you’re selling books you could upsell someone from the paperback version to the hardcover. You can put a headline above the upsell section to suggest other customers were interested in these products.

Amazon is offering an example of a bundle here to increase their AOV.

Free shipping with minimum order value

People do not like to pay shipping costs. If you do away with shipping costs your sales will probably just go up. Now we can leverage removing shipping costs to increase our AOV.

To hit your target AOV you can incentive higher priced purchases with upsells and cross-sells that will remove shipping costs for your customers. If you’re worried about losing on the shipping costs you can raise the price on your cross-sells. Most likely those aren’t purchased regularly anyway. You can then remarket those cross-sells at a discounted (normal) rate that includes shipping costs.

Abandoned Cart

Did you know over 71% of carts are abandoned? It’s closer to 77% on mobile. That means your customers are adding items to their cart and leaving your store without buying. Yikes.

The good news is you can resolve more than half of the reasons people abandon their carts. And over 30% are recoverable with the help of abandoned cart emails.

Why people abandon their carts and what to do about it

• 59% of abandoned carts are not ready to buy

These are the toughest to resolve. If someone is just price shopping you may not get the sale. Sometimes a customer won’t be signed in so you have no other way to send an abandoned cart email. A great fallback is to offer a lead generator to capture email the address. If the lead generator is product-specific all the better.

• 48% leave due to extra costs

It is best to display the extra costs as early as possible. If a customer gets to the cart and the fees start adding up they will leave. Shipping, handling, taxes, and other fees will cost you the sale.

• 18% security concerns

Make sure your website is served over HTTPS. Almost all websites use HTTPS today so it’s probably safe to say you’re already doing that. However, you need to make sure all the files on your site are also served over HTTPS. If some files come from an HTTP source your customer may see a mixed warning signal and have some doubts.

The best way to overcome security concerns is to showcase lots of customer reviews, make sure it’s easy to contact you, offer a clear refund policy, and offer a guarantee.

• 17% long and convoluted checkout process
  

Your checkout process needs to be quick and painless. There is no greater moment of doubt than when a customer has to reach for his credit card. 

Remove any fields you don’t need. It is recommended to have 7-8 fields tops. Amasty offers an extension to customize your checkout.  If you add too many fields break the checkout up into multiple steps. 

Magento has documentation on how to customize the checkout but it can be complicated and best left to a developer.

• 9/10 will abandon if the site is too slow

Please see the #2 optimize performance section and make sure your website is fast.

A good abandon cart email

Over 30% of abandoned carts are recoverable so let’s talk about a good email. Just sending an email isn’t going to get that lost revenue back.

Your email should contain the following:

• Snappy subject line
• Introduction text
• Items left in the cart
• Offer or discount
• Checkout button or call to action
• Reviews or social proof
• Closing text

We’ve got an example of a great email that checks off all of these boxes here.

Here are some other great examples of abandoned cart emails. 
If possible use a drip campaign to send multiple emails. Amasty offers an abandoned cart extension to help you set this up easily.